Post navigation

Day one: Snowmageddon

Someone came to their senses and cancelled the symposium. Yippee, I’m free to stay at home in my home office and watch the wonderful world of snow outside my window. Our new greenhouse is holding up pretty well. We have a small heater and two light bulbs in there for heat. We are trying to winter over several 8’ bananas, cannas, brugmansias, sedums, echeverias and other tropical delights. The greenhouse is made by Shelter Logic and it’s 10’ x 20’. It took three people (three smart, McGyver kind of people) over 6 hours to put it together! Then we lined the edges with leftover stack stone to make sure that it would laugh at any wind. My worry with the snow was that it might build up on top and bend the support poles and collapse the whole thing. However, the heater is keeping the inside just warm enough that once about an inch piles up on the top it starts to melt and slides right off. The interesting part is the heat is mainly located in the back third of the greenhouse. That’s where the snow is sliding off. So I suspect that the front third is colder…or substantially colder. But, we put more winter hardy things in that section. We moved extra pansies, some heucheras, some nandinas and other assorted landscape material in there – mostly because we had the room. Our temps today are high 20s to low 30s. Not too bad. Unless you are a banana or a brugmansia! I’ll post a few pics to show you how successful (or not) we were.